Black South Africa: ONE DAE SOON By Alexis De Veaux Drawing by Isaac Shamsucl-Din Tfven the calm ones are angry when they speak. Their J—J handsfly with animated gestures. Some will go back. Bad as it is. They’ve got to see theirfamilies, the mountains, the streets. Others are here in exile. Maybe never to return. To spread the word. Wait. Work steady. For a liberated South Africa. No matter how long it takes. Help, in any to keep the spirit o f resistance at home For the people at home live in apartheid hell. In South Africa, black people out-number whites five to one. Yet four million whites viciously segregate and discriminate against 26 million Africans, Coloreds (mixed race) and Asians (Indians). Blacks are 84 percent of the population. They live on 13 percent of the land. They own nothing fertile or worthwhile. They are dirt-poor. Their labor is dirt-cheap: African farm workers average $268 a year; white, $4,987. White miners average $1,056 monthly; blacks, $175. They live in squalor and degradation, in their own country. Whites, on the other hand, enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world. Sixteen percent of the population, they occupy 87 percent of the land. They take home 64 percent of the country's abundant wealth. “There is no place in the world like South Africa,” says Sekulu Shange, a passionate black South African many years in exile and owner of the popular Sekulu Record Shack on Harlem’s 125th Street in New York City. “Apartheid is a continuous process of annihilation. It makes us foreigners in our own land.” In their own land, African families are continually torn apart by government rule and economic necessity. They are forced to live barren where Where in segregated semiautonomous, “homelands” far from whites, poverty and pestilence breed, there are no urban centers. No industries. So men are forced to become migrant laborers in white areas. Often under contract for months. Even years. They live in men-only hostels (dormitory housing). Where women and children are not permitted by law. They are a source of cheap, unskilled labor. Separation from their families causes loneliness. Disorientation. Their contintual exodus from the “homelands” eats away African family, social and political structures. Women and children left alone in the rural “homelands” virtually starve. They live with extreme psychic and social frustration. On meager yields of food— squeezed from the hard, arid dirt. Women provide the agricultural labor for their splintered communities. Six days a week. With none of the tools of modern agriculture. In the big cities such as Johannesburg, black domestic workers average $21 a 70-hour work week, $13 in the smaller cities, $9 in rural areas. In South Africa women suffer the most; there is little, if any, opportunity for education or advancement. They have no rights to property or self; for the women are opBlack people in South Africa have no rights. They cannot vote. There is no “redressfrom the law. ”Nojustice, the “law”is anti-black. Period pressed as women, blacks and workers. Under apartheid their children are cataloged “unnecessary appendages.” They may be separated from mothers at any time and shipped to other “homelands.” Children may not live with mothers who are live-in domestics in white areas. Nor can lovers or husbands stay overnight. Offspring of unmarried women are. considered “illegal.” By design, migrantlabor policies separate women from children from meh. Black people in South Africa have no rights. They cannot vote. There is no “redress from the law." No justice. The “law” is anti-black. Period. “They don’t need a reason to arrest you,” Azkes Mokae offers quietly. He sits on the edge of a sofa in a friend’s apartment in Manhattan. He is an actor. A mature man. Winner of a Tony Award for his performance in Athol Fugard’s recent Broadway show “Master Harold". ., and the boys. His work in the theater takes him around the world and back and forth to home. “They can take you in for almost anything,” he emphasizes. “Anything: — Loitering. Not working. Not having paid your taxes. Being in the wrong area. Not having a passbook.” Every African over 16 must carry a passbook under apartheid law. At all times. It is a record of “Bantu identification,” wallet size—record of employment; permits to enter white areas; a photo; fingerprints; tax and family status. Any white person can demand to see it. If an African is caught without the hated book, on any street corner, at home, any time of day or night, she or he can be arrested and detained. But, confides a writer friend from Cape Town, “sometimes I am fed up. I go out without it and go anywhere. Just to flirt with freedom." Her laughter is seditious. “In South Africa day-to-day life a black person is always at the mercy of some white official. Whether or not he is in a good frame of mind that morning. If he got up on the wrong side of the bed, then, sister, you are in big trouble.” To live every day and know how that feels. To be hated every way possible. To feel your back breaking. This is what apartheid means. And this is what the people of South Africa are fighting. Every waking minute. By the hundreds and thousands. In groups of ones and threes. •Freedom, freedom. It is just a matter of time. History is on their side. And theirs is a history of unshakable resistance. And unshakable will. For blacks in South Africa have never accepted white rule. Even as far back as 1652 When the first of the Dutch and the Shamsud-Din describes his illustration: “Old warriors, the elders, sitting and waiting, were captives of the British after the defeat of Zulu forces fighting to save their lands from incursion. They fought under the great Shaka, one of the greatest military strategists of all time — a friend and protector of the early British who came as adventurers and people seeking an opportunity to make a simple life for themselves. Their secret plan, though, was to check out the land for purposes of exploitation. The assasination of Shaka led to the disarray of the Zulu empire, which, at its height, held sway over most of the lands and peoples of southern Africa. The dark figure in the background symbolizes the youth, who have no fear and who will inherit an unsure but definite future as owners of their own land, shapers of destiny. Inevitable. The mother and child bespeak the reality of life in the hell that is Black South Africa. All the other figures are reflections, including the warrior in his prime who will eventually lead and dominate his environment.” Clinton St. Quarterly 35
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